Bookbinding, sketching, and collecting street art

Howling Hill House

I’ve done a lot of wedding commissions, but this has to have been my favourite so far. Not only was it a lot of fun, the venue that the reception is being held at is a place for which I have a huge soft spot: Howling Hill House.

The couple’s very vague brief was this: they wanted the invites to be small notebooks with just a few pages (and a map), if possible the cover should feature the lyrics from a song they love, and it should be vintagey or countryside in theme. There were only five invites to be made, and each one would be personalised to include the name of the room at Hill House which the guest had been allocated.

After much pondering I came up with the idea to make it sort of scrapbooky/vintagey in style, and here’s the final result.

Because each book only contains six pages I opted for a wrap-around style as experiments showed that binding so few pages in any other style looked a bit odd. I chose a gorgeous paper by 7Gypsies for the covers, and added the lyrics from their chosen song by hand.

I also added the date of the wedding

The inside of the covers were lined with brown parcel paper, to add to the scrapbook feel.

The pages are a lovely 200gsm cartridge paper, and the couple chose a typewriter style font for the text.

The invites contain two maps. One is the very pretty map from the Hill House website (pretty, but not actually that accurate), and the other is a little map printed from Google (not so pretty, but a far better aid to navigation).

As an extra touch I made some little envelopes and filled them with heart-shaped confetti that I punched from vintage pages of Romeo & Juliet. These have been tucked into the back of each invite.

Finally, the invites were fastened with some lovely coarse twine and a button (a different style button for each invitation).

Oooh, it’s our wedding invitations!
We could not be more thrilled with these. They are exactly what my mind was trying to create and we are so excited about sending them out.
Emma did an amazing job, being patient with our vagueness and really listening to the few ideas we managed to articulate ;). The personal service and lovely little touches (like the confetti) were great and we feel like we got a total bargain, as well as very lovely keepsakes for our wedding guests.